Sylph: Poems

Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize Series

by Abigail Cloud

In her first collection of poems, Abigail Cloud draws inspiration from nineteenth-century European Romantic ballets, which often portrayed scorned females as mystical spirits such as sylphs, shades, and wilis. Some of these creatures seduced men into dancing until they died -- punishment for inconstancy or lured them into love. For Cloud, the dark gravity that holds these enchanters to the earth is the same as our own and thus these demons are as everyday as air.
Sylph filters our world through the lenses of dance, folklore, and history, revealing our contemporary lives to be dreamlike and prismatic. In the blink the mouse spent to disappear, I loved you, avows the sylph. The cost of her ascension -- and ours -- is steep: our price speech, our forgetting breath. Such are the stakes in this complex, seductive, and stunning debut.

Genres: Poetry

88 pages, Paperback

First published April 7, 2014

About the author

Abigail Cloud's poems have appeared widely in journals such as Black Warrior Review, The Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, The Gettysburg Review, and Quarterly West. Cloud is on the faculty at Bowling Green State University, where she is editor-in-chief of Mid-American Review.

Reviews

[Tara · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was selected by Dana Levin as the winner of the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize. It doesn't disappoint. While I admit I'm not an avid reader of poetry, I have never read poems with such innovative, intriguing topics as these. Ethereal and earthy at the same time, the series of poems set in an asylum were for me the most inventive and powerful. I reread about a dozen times "Letter to a Suicidal Man." This is just one stanza:

Once there was a man who went
into a mine and he was heavy
and stayed there. They say
his wife packed him a lunch
and he left it on the kitchen table
and that's where she found it
before they told her.

Doesn't the image of that abandoned lunch stay with you?

[C. Varn · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is something both eclectic and singular about Abigail Cloud's Sylph. Cloud's background in dance and her love of the classically demonic, ephemerally monstrous, pairing air spirits with baroque fairy tales and airy silence with the gothic: Cloud's poems are urgent and slightly surreal. She renders the femininity and love in a voice both terribly alien and remarkably human.

[Jackie Craven · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read Abigail Cloud's Sylph (Pleiades Press, 2014) slowly, half-drugged by the language, which is both dense and ethereal. The 71-page collection describes legendary creatures whose "wings cast poems / over the glass of the earth." At first, I felt lost, and then—then—utterly enchanted. I was reminded of Louise Glück's Wild Iris poems. These voices are alien, yet heartbreakingly familiar. Sylph won the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Series Award from Pleiades Press.

[Jane Wageman]

After reading the collection, I learned that the structure of the collection is based on 19th-century ballet, with the poems in each section reflecting the different acts: the prologue, the black act, the white act, and the apotheosis (rising). I was especially interested in Abby's charaterization of the White Act in ballet as a foray into another space, often the woods, so in her collection it becomes a place for exploring mental illness--in her words, "the brain's woods" a place of unbridled, uncontrolled wandering.

Favorites included "Postcards for My Mother" "Letter to a Suicidal Man," "Sylphide," and "Burying"